“IF YOU WANT A HAPPY ENDING,” Orson Welles once quipped, “that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” But sometimes, it’s not that the story stops so much as that the audience stops paying attention. This might be one way to think of #MeToo, which, in the years since it has faded from prominence, has been historicized in largely triumphalist terms. One version of the story goes something like this: there used to be evil men who harassed and attacked women, and because these men were powerful, or seemed so, nobody stopped them. But then, all that changed. Some women began to tell the truth, in public, about what had happened to them. And others joined them. They felt compelled to speak—empowered, at last, by each other’s example. One by one, abusive men were felled, like Samson after a haircut; their money and status were no match for the women’s moral authority. The women were heroes, restored, at last, to a place of public respect by the force of their testimony. And we, the audience, were changed. We were enlightened and made more empathetic; we were reminded of the power of speaking the truth. This, generally, is where the story stops: on a happy ending. The curtain lowers, and the lights fade as cheers echo in the mezzanine.
One Way Back, Christine Blasey Ford’s memoir of her testimony at the confirmation hearings of now–Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and its aftermath, extends the scene a little further, into the months and years that followed her public disclosure. This prolonged attention reveals a more complicated and difficult story than the typically pat histories of #MeToo allow. Ford is one of the most famous accusers of the #MeToo era, and the movement’s dimming hopes were already becoming apparent as her story was unfolding. Unlike some of #MeToo’s other prominent public figures, Ford didn’t choose to testify; instead, she was all but forced to. Most important, her words were futile: the man she says assaulted her when she was in high school was not vanquished by her declaration. He was confirmed to the Supreme Court, where he went on to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Instead of triumph, Ford’s story is one of anxiety, humiliation, ostracism, torment, and defeat. And so her account undermines the cheap sentimentality typical of conventional liberal accounts of #MeToo—from the solemn faces of Taylor Swift and Ashley Judd, dubbed “The Silence Breakers,” on the cover of Time magazine in 2017, to the schlocky righteousness of Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan in the Harvey Weinstein reporting drama She Said. In One Way Back, “courage”—that faintly condescending term with which public survivors like Ford are usually praised—does not enter into it. Instead, Ford’s story guides readers to an uncomfortable awareness: that #MeToo, for all the spectacle and moral edification that it was supposed to provide for its audience, demanded something much darker and costlier from the women at its center.